READING NEW YORK; Mobsters, Poets and the Trial of a Whale

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: January 20, 2008

JIMMY BRESLIN stared helplessly out the window of his office in The Daily News one afternoon in the 1970s, seeking inspiration -- through a haze of cigar smoke -- from the nondescript facade of a building across 42nd Street.

He betrayed no visible brain activity, not even a flicker of the genius that infused his columns, one of which was close to being overdue. I know because I was his anxious editor.

But his blank stare was an illusion. Mr. Breslin was eavesdropping. He was mining a rich lode of gossip from his assistant, Ann Marie, who was chatting on the telephone outside his office door.

Mr. Breslin is a very good listener. Almost imperceptibly, his head began to turn until he finally fixed his gaze on Ann Marie, and in one of those unheralded but defining moments in journalism, a series of columns about the underside of life in the Big City -- with the names changed to protect the guilty and Mr. Breslin himself -- was born.

In ''The Good Rat'' (Ecco Press, $24.95), Mr. Breslin recalls another of his eureka moments, which took place in a Brooklyn courtroom where he had gone to research a book about two cops turned Mafia hit men. One was fat and sad-eyed, the other thin and listless.

''Am I going to write 70,000 words about these two?'' Mr. Breslin asked himself. ''Rather I lay brick.'' But when the trial started two years ago, he recalls, an unknown name on the prosecution witness list ''turns the proceeding into something that thrills: the autobiography of Burton Kaplan, criminal.'' Mr. Breslin had found his subject, a Brooklyn Tech dropout, father of a judge, who was ''a great merchant, too great, and after he sold everything that did belong to him, he sold things that did not.''

And lucky for us. His latest book ingeniously synthesizes Burton Kaplan's bizarre biography, his testimony, and Mr. Breslin's memoirs of his own earlier exploits and encounters with characters who punctuated his columns but are mostly dead, imprisoned, or hidden in witness protection programs.

''You can drink with legitimate people if you want,'' Mr. Breslin writes of his social circle, adding that he is a product of nights when the mobster Fat Tony Salerno looked around the Copacabana, scowled at him and asked, '' 'Didn't you go where I told you to?' ''

Where had Mr. Breslin been told to go? That morning, he had encountered Mr. Salerno at a court engagement where the mobster complained, ''You look like a bum,'' and slipped him an East Side tailor's business card.

''Tell him you want a suit made right away so you don't make me ashamed I know you,'' Mr. Salerno ordered.

The book is cleverly constructed, opening with an annotated cast of characters, and it delivers canny anthropological insights into organized crime (''The feds soon realized all they had to do was follow guys who kiss each other and they'd know the whole Mafia''). Mr. Breslin also criticizes John Gotti for having ''violated New York's revered rush-hour rules when he had Paul Castellano killed in the middle of it.''

Mr. Breslin's account of a victim who was killed by mistake belies the idea that there are no innocent bystanders. And every page reveals his talent for putting a twinkle in your mind's eye (the lawyer Bruce Cutler wore ''a light khaki summer suit that could have used 10 pounds less to cover''). The book is Jimmy Breslin at his best.

''Trying Leviathan'' (Princeton University Press, $29.95) isn't just another fish story; that is plain from its subtitle, ''The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature.''

D. Graham Burnett, a history professor at Princeton, details an arcane 1818 legal battle that began when Samuel Judd, a New York candlemaker and oil merchant, refused to pay for state inspection of three casks of spermaceti oil -- insisting that it was not fish oil, subject to state certification, but whale oil.

Professor Burnett occasionally lapses into brackish academic prose. But over all, his story is riveting, one of those wonderful obscure microcosmic matters. The case, he writes, is a telling episode in the history of science and sheds light on the status of philosophy and natural history ''during critical years in the emergence of the city's learned institutions and intellectual culture.''

Lots of things seem to occur in New York without rhyme or reason, but a new book, ''I Speak of the City: Poems of New York'' (Columbia University Press, $24.95), reminds jaded New Yorkers that some people can find poetry in the magnificent and the mundane.

The anthology, selected by Stephen Wolf, a novelist and teacher, ranges across four centuries and presents more than 100 voices, including William Cullen Bryant (''Hymn of the City''), Langston Hughes (''The Heart of Harlem'') and Jack Kerouac (''MacDougal Street Blues'').

In his introduction, the poet John Hollander writes that for poets, New York ''is a great poem itself, in an unwritten tongue that constantly needs retranslation into a poet's individual language.'' The selections, Mr. Wolf writes, ''have been either inspired by or in conflict with New York, and sometimes even both in the same poem.''

They range from sonnets to epics, inspiring to disturbing, immortal to forgettable. Each tells us the city is defined by the eyes of its beholder.

''Goldfeder's Modern Election Law'' (New York Legal Publishing, $125) isn't for everyone. But with the presidential primary election on Feb. 5, it is a timely and authoritative guide to New York State's byzantine election law. Moreover, it's surprisingly accessible, not only to candidates and their supporters, but to political junkies and concerned laymen.

The author, Jerry H. Goldfeder, special counsel to Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, is a respected election lawyer and professor in his own right.

The guide is crammed with practical advice on deciphering the conundrums of getting and staying on the ballot. It also includes a chapter that wisely and wittily addresses ethical issues.

PHOTO: Jimmy Breslin, above, now a biographer of the criminal Burton Kaplan (''after he sold everything that did belong to him, he sold things that did not''); and a document, right, from D. Graham Burnett's account of a 19th-century legal battle. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MATTHEW ROBERTS; BELOW, NEW BEDFORD WHALING MUSEUM)